Another Potential Aral Sea Disaster Brewing In Kazakhstan - Reuters

[hatrack]

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — "Kazakhstan may face an ecological disaster on the scale of the drying out of the Aral Sea if it does not adopt better water management practices and win Chinese cooperation, the United Nations warned Tuesday.

A 1960s Soviet plan to redirect water for cotton irrigation from rivers that fed into the Aral Sea starved what was once the world's fourth largest lake of water, leaving two separate bodies of water in a wasteland of salty mud. Central Asia's second biggest lake, Lake Balkhash, is now also in danger, the United Nations Development Program said. Forty times the size of Lake Geneva, Balkhash lies 250 miles north of the Kazakh commercial city Almaty.

EDIT

The river Ili, the principal of seven tributaries leading to Lake Balkhash, flows from northwestern China's Xinjiang province into Kazakhstan and past Almaty on its way to Balkhash which lies wholly in Kazakhstan. The lake, half salt and half fresh water, has already suffered from industrial pollution, but too much usage of the Ili's water in China could seal its fate.

"With the population growth curve, agriculture, industry, and urbanization in the western areas of China, there is of course going to be more water use on the Chinese side," Akcura told a news conference introducing a UNDP report on water in Kazakhstan."

EDIT

http://www.enn.com/news/2004-01-14/s_12025.asp

[pansypoo53219]

1. stupid human never learn

do NOT fuck with mother nature.